August 13, 2020
We propose a novel amortized variational inference scheme for an empirical Bayes meta-learning model, where model parameters are treated as latent variables. We learn the prior distribution over model parameters conditioned on limited training data using a variational autoencoder approach. Our framework proposes sharing the same amortized inference network between the conditional prior and variational posterior distributions over the model parameters. While the posterior leverages both the labeled support and query data, the conditional prior is based only on the labeled support data. We show that in earlier work, relying on Monte-Carlo approximation, the conditional prior collapses to a Dirac delta function. In contrast, our variational approach prevents this collapse and preserves uncertainty over the model parameters. We evaluate our approach on the miniImageNet, CIFAR-FS and FC100 datasets, and present results demonstrating its advantages over previous work.
Written by
Ekaterina Iakovleva
Jakob Verbeek
Karteek Alahari
Publisher
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2020
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Core Machine Learning
May 26, 2026
Valentin Wyart, Huy V. Vo, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Marc Szafraniec, Max Seitzer, Patrick Labatut, Piotr Bojanowski
May 26, 2026
May 19, 2026
Alvin W. M. Tan, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Michael C. Frank, Angel Villar Corrales, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Dongyan Lin, Emmanuel Dupoux, Jiayi Shen, Juan Pino, Mahi Luthra, Martin Gleize, Phillip Rust, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Surya Parimi, Tom Fizycki, Vanessa Stark, Yosuke Higuchi, Youssef Benchekroun
May 19, 2026
May 17, 2026
Alexandre Rezende, Rohit Patel, Steven McClain
May 17, 2026
May 12, 2026
Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 12, 2026
October 31, 2019
Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
October 31, 2019
October 27, 2019
Zhuoyuan Chen, Demi Guo, Tong Xiao, Saining Xie, Xinlei Chen, Haonan Yu, Jonathan Gray, Kavya Srinet, Haoqi Fan, Jerry Ma, Charles R. Qi, Shubham Tulsiani, Arthur Szlam, Larry Zitnick
October 27, 2019
April 25, 2020
Yilun Du, Joshua Meier, Jerry Ma, Rob Fergus, Alexander Rives
April 25, 2020
June 11, 2019
Yuandong Tian, Jerry Ma, Qucheng Gong, Shubho Sengupta, Zhuoyuan Chen, James Pinkerton, Larry Zitnick
June 11, 2019

Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models